Law Commons^™

March 1, 2009: Imagine The Court Being Helpful, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Imagine the Court Being Helpful“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 22, 2009: Rick Warren's Prayer, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Rick Warren's Prayer“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 15, 2009: The Problem With Today's Church-State Jurisprudence, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Problem with Today's Church-State Jurisprudence“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

January 9, 2009: So Help Me God?, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “So Help Me God?“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

The Unexceptionalism Of Evolving Standards, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Conventional wisdom is that outside the Eighth Amendment, the Supreme Court does not engage in the sort of explicitly majoritarian state nose-counting for which the "evolving standards of decency" doctrine is famous. Yet this impression is simply inaccurate. Across a stunning variety of civil liberties contexts, the Court routinely-and explicitly--determines constitutional protection based on whether a majority of states agree with it. This Article examines the Supreme Court's reliance on the majority position of the states to identify and apply constitutional norms, and then turns to the qualifications, explanations, and implications of state polling as a larger doctrinal phenomenon. While …

How The Dissent Becomes The Majority: Using Federalism To Transform Coalitions In The U.S. Supreme Court, Tonja Jacobi, Vanessa A. Baird

Faculty Articles

This Article proposes that dissenting Supreme Court Justices provide cues in their written opinions about how future litigants can reframe case facts and legal arguments in similar future cases to garner majority support. Questions of federal-state power cut across most other substantive legal issues, and this can provide a mechanism for splitting existing majorities in future cases. By signaling to future litigants when this potential exists, dissenting judges can transform a dissent into a majority in similar future cases.

We undertake an empirical investigation of dissenting opinions in which the dissenting Justice suggests that future cases ought to be framed …

Ideology And Exceptionalism In Intellectual Property: An Empirical Study, Matthew Sag, Tonja Jacobi, Maxim Sytch

Faculty Articles

In this Article, we examine the effect of judicial ideology on IP case outcomes before the Supreme Court from 1954 to 2006. We find that ideology is a significant determinant of IP cases: the more conservative a justice is, the more likely he or she is to vote in favor of recognizing and enforcing rights to intellectual property. We also find evidence that the relationship is more complex than a purely ideological account would suggest; our results suggest that law matters too. We find that a number of factors that are specific to IP are also consequential. Additionally, we show …

Ricci Glitch? The Unexpected Appearance Of Transferred Intent In Title Vii, Kerri Lynn Stone

Faculty Publications

In the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court officially opened the door to what this Article identifies as a theory of “transferred intent” jurisprudence under Title VII. The principle of transferred intent, borrowed from tort and criminal law, has never before been seen as factoring into Title VII antidiscrimination jurisprudence. In Ricci, the Supreme Court assumed that a city’s refusal to promote firefighters qualifying for promotion based on exams that appeared to disproportionately screen out members of minority groups amounted to deliberate discrimination, irrespective of their individual races or whether their individual races were actually taken into account. …

A House Divided: Earl Caldwell, The New York Times, And The Quest For A Testimonial Privilege, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

In the 1972 case of Branzburg v. Hayes, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment does not protect journalists who refuse to reveal their confidential sources or news gathering product in response to a federal grand jury subpoena. That decision has remained vital for 35 years and has reverberated through a number of recent high-profile cases. Despite some form of protection in nearly every state court, reporters haled before a federal judge may have no recourse save prison. Devastating as Branzburg has been for the so-called journalist's privilege, its negative impact has been far broader. Branzburg is one of …

The Supreme Court's Hands-Off Approach To Religious Doctrine: An Introduction, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

Although the current state of the United States Supreme Court's Religion Clause jurisprudence is an area of considerable complexity, the Court's approach is largely premised upon a number of basic underlying principles and doctrines. This Symposium issue explores an underlying principle of the Supreme Court's current Religion Clause jurisprudence, the Court's hands-off approach to questions of religious practice and belief. The Symposium is based on the program of the Law and Religion Section at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, in which a panel of leading scholars was asked to evaluate the Court's approach. The …

An Analysis Of The Death Penalty Jurisprudence Of The October 2007 Supreme Court Term (The Twentieth Annual Supreme Court Review), Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

God And The Land: A Holy War Between Religious Exercise And Community Planning And Development, Patricia E. Salkin, Amy Lavine

Scholarly Works

This article is a brief introduction to The Albany Government Law Review symposium on God and the Land. This piece sets forth a brief history of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) setting the backdrop for the controversy that has surrounded the Act and its impact on religious entities and municipalities. Since the enactment of RLUIPA, the floodgates have burst open with litigation in attempts to clarify many ambiguities in the statute. The remainder of the piece provides a sneak preview of the articles contained in The Albany Government Law Review by Professors Angela Carmella, Marci Hamilton, …

Remaking The United States Supreme Court In The Courts' Of Appeals Image, Chris Guthrie, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We argue that Congress should remake the United States Supreme Court in the U.S. courts' of appeals image by increasing the size of the Court's membership, authorizing panel decision making, and retaining an en banc procedure for select cases. In so doing, Congress would expand the Court's capacity to decide cases, facilitating enhanced clarity and consistency in the law as well as heightened monitoring of lower courts and the other branches. Remaking the Court in this way would not only expand the Court's decision making capacity but also improve the Court's composition, competence, and functioning.

Social Movements And Judging: An Essay On Institutional Reform Litigation And Desegregation In Dallas, Texas, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

This Article discusses the political and legal barriers that have surfaced to undermine the ability of courts to fashion remedies that offer justice to aggrieved individuals and to render rights-based institutional reform liti­gation a judicial relic. Part II examines the historical development of in­stitutional reform litigation and examines the political factors that created the opportunity for dramatic changes in legal approaches to the issue of racial inequality. Part III examines litigation challenging segregation in Dallas public schools. It also discusses cases filed in the immediate post­-Brown era and contrasts those cases with Judge Sanders's rulings on the subject. In …

Constitution And The Laws Of War During The Civil War, The Federal Courts, Practice & Procedure, Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uncovers the forgotten complex of relationships between the U.S. Constitution, citizenship and the laws of war. The Supreme Court today believes that both noncitizens and citizens who are military enemies in a congressionally-authorized war are entitled to judicially-enforceable rights under the Constitution. The older view was that the U.S. government’s military actions against noncitizen enemies were not limited by the Constitution, but only by the international laws of war. On the other hand, in the antebellum period, the prevailing view was U.S. citizenship should carry with it protection from ever being treated as a military enemy under the …

A Hands-Off Approach To Religious Doctrine: What Are We Talking About?, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

At the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Schools, the program organized by the Section on Law and Religion presented for consideration the claim that “the United States Supreme Court has shown an increasing unwillingness to engage in deciding matters that relate to the interpretation of religious practice and belief.” The Court, it was proposed, is — more and more — taking a “hands-off approach to religious doctrine.”

This proposal was, and remains, timely and important, as is illustrated by — to mention just a few, diverse examples — the ongoing property-ownership dispute between several “breakaway” Episcopal …

Setting The Size Of The Supreme Court, F. Andrew Hessick, Samuel P. Jordan

All Faculty Scholarship

As with any institutional feature, the size of the Supreme Court should be informed by a definition of functional goals. This article describes how the current size of the Supreme Court is largely untethered from any such definition, and it begins the process of understanding how size and Court performance might interact. To do so, it identifies a list of institutional goals for the Supreme Court and explores how changing the size of the Court promotes or obstructs the attainment of those goals. Given that the Court's institutional goals are numerous and occasionally in tension, there is no definitive answer …

You’Ve Come A Long Way, Baby: Two Waves Of Juvenile Justice Reforms As Seen From Jena, Louisiana, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

This article describes the origins and impact of two modern reforms that dramatically rewrote the law governing the prosecution of juvenile offenders: the Warren Court’s due process decisions and the juvenile justice legislation of the 1990s. Beginning with the prosecution of Mychal Bell, who was one of the Jena 6, the article provides a broader historical and analytical framework to assess the procedural protections available to juveniles charged with serious offenses, particularly the adequacy of the remedies to challenge prosecutorial discretion and disparate treatment by the prosecution.

The article first describes the key role race played in the Warren Court’s …

Judicial Review, Local Values, And Pluralism, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

At the Federalist Society's 2008 National Student Symposium, a panel of scholars was asked to consider the question, does pervasive judicial review threaten to destroy local identity by homogenizing community norms? The answer to this question is yes, pervasive judicial review certainly does threaten local identity, because such review can homogenize[e] community norms, either by dragging them into conformity with national, constitutional standards or (more controversially) by subordinating them to the reviewers' own commitments. It is important to recall, however, that while it is true that an important feature of our federalism is local variation in laws and values, it …

The Conscience Of A Court, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author explains his conclusion that the Supreme Court, as a matter of conscience, considers racial discrimination to be good for America. That conclusion, he argues, offers the only plausible account of the Court's repeated insistence on displacing populist efforts to promote racial equality with the Court's own, more-regressive, version of expedient racial politics. Although the Court has had what is at best a checkered history when called upon to adjudicate claims of racial injustice, until now, the contemporary Court might arguably have been accorded the benefit of the doubt. But after its five-to-four ruling in the 2007 Resegregation case, …

Postracial Discrimination, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Claims of racial injustice can be challenged by arguing that the culture makes it possible for minorities to compete with whites on a level playing field. Under this reasoning, racial disparities that continue to inhere in the allocation of societal benefits and burdens must be caused by the attributes of individual minority group members themselves, rather than by any invidious consideration of their race. The election of President Obama now gives this argument more apparent plausibility than it has had in the past. Indeed, if one were inclined to preserve the nation’s tradition of privileging white interests over the interests …

Celebrating Thurgood Marshall: The Prophetic Dissenter, Susan Low Bloch

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Thurgood Marshall was born 100 years ago into a country substantially divided along color lines. Marshall could not attend the University of Maryland School of Law because he was a Negro; he had trouble locating bathrooms that were not for “whites only.” Today, by contrast, we celebrate his life and accomplishments. Broadway has a play called Thurgood devoted to him; Baltimore/Washington International Airport is now BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport; even the University of Maryland renamed its law library in his honor. How did we come this far? How far do we still have to go? This article will consider what …

A Tale Of Two Lochners: The Untold History Of Substantive Due Process And The Idea Of Fundamental Rights, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

To say that the Supreme Court's decision in Lochner v. New York is infamous is an understatement. Scholars remember Lochner for its strong right to contract and laissez-faire ideals--at least that is the conventional account of the case. Whether one concludes that Lochner leads to the judicial activism of Roe v. Wade, or foreshadows strong property rights, the standard account depends upon an important assumption: that the Lochner era's conception of fundamental rights parallels that of today. From that assumption, it appears to follow that Lochner symbolizes the grave political dangers of substantive due process, with its "repulsive connotation …

Supreme Neglect Of Text And History, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article reviews Supreme Neglect: How to Revive Constitutional Protection for Private Property by Richard A. Epstein (2008).

In Supreme Neglect, Professor Richard Epstein has produced a clear and elegant synthesis for the general reader of his lifetime of thinking about the Takings Clause and, more broadly, about the role of property in our constitutional system. Appealing to both history and constitutional text, Epstein argues that the Takings Clause bars government regulations that diminish the value of private property (with the exception of a highly constrained category of police power regulations). This essay shows that neither the text of the …

The Stubborn Incoherence Of Regulatory Takings, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A., Inc. was met with restrained but largely appreciative notice by commentators. Lingle declared that the Takings Clause affirmatively protects property owners by awarding them compensation for regulations that impose the functional equivalent of a condemnation of their property. The regulatory takings doctrine thus differs from the substantive due process doctrine, which instead reviews the validity of a regulation and offers as its remedy the invalidation of an offending government action. Clearing the underbrush that had grown in nearly a century of Supreme Court precedent, the Court appeared to have made …

Ruth Bader Ginsburg And Sensible Pragmatism In Federal Jurisdictional Policy, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

This article, written as part of a symposium celebrating the work of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the occasion of her fifteenth year on the Supreme Court, examines the strain of sensible legal pragmatism that informs Justice Ginsburg's writing in the fields of Civil Procedure and Federal Jurisdiction. Taking as its point of departure the Supreme Court's decision in City of Chicago v. International College of Surgeons, in which Ginsburg dissented, the article develops an argument against strict textualism in federal jurisdictional analysis. In its place, the article urges a purposive mode of interpretation that approaches jurisdictional text with a …

Comment On Intellectual Property, Concentration And The Limits Of Antitrust In The Biotech Seed Industry, F. Scott Kieff

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This comment was filed with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division on December 31, 2009, as "Comments Regarding Agriculture and Antitrust Enforcement Issues in Our 21st Century Economy" in response to the DOJ/USDA request for public comments for the agencies' joint workshops on antitrust issues in the agricultural sector.

Regarding firm size and integration, it must be kept in mind that the agriculture industry in the U.S. has, for good reasons, moved beyond the historic, pastoral image of small family farms operating in quiet isolation, devoid of big business and modern technologies. The genetic traits that give modern seeds their …

Constitutional Limits On Punitive Damages Awards: An Analysis Of Supreme Court Precedent, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last fifteen years, the Supreme Court has formulated new constitutional principles to constrain punitive damages awards imposed by state courts, invoking its authority under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This intervention has been controversial from the start, generating dissents from several Justices asserting that the actions of the Court are unwarranted and amount to unjustified judicial activism. Over the ensuing years lower courts and commentators have criticized the Court’s prescription of procedural and substantive limitations, finding them to be vague and unnecessarily restrictive of state common law prerogatives. Some observers with an economic orientation have …

Supreme Court Justices, Empathy, And Social Change: A Comment On Lani Guinier's Demosprudence Through Dissent, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Souter's imminent retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court provides President Obama with his first opportunity for a judicial nomination to the high court. President Obama's remarks about the relevance of life experience and of empathy are sparking discussion of relevant judicial qualifications. This Essay examines Professor Lani Guinier's recent argument that dissenting justices, particularly through the use of oral dissents, may spur ordinary people to action and that such dissents may expand the range of democratic action, as part of what she and Gerald Torres call "demosprudence." That controversial decisions by the United States Supreme Court can spur dissenting …

Justice Ginsburg's Footnotes, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

In this short article written for the New England School of Law's March Symposium on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I report on what happened when I embarked on a project of trying to read every single footnote Justice Ginsburg has ever written as a justice on the Supreme Court. As the article relates, this project was impossible to complete because Justice Ginsburg, it turns out, has written a lot, lot, lot of footnotes. Instead, I ended up reading all of Justice Ginsburg's footnotes from three of her terms. In the article, I develop a nine-part taxonomy of Supreme Court footnotes …